Networking for business or other social purposes traditionally involved meeting in person and exchanging business cards or contact information written on a piece of paper or cocktail napkin. Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn provided individuals with an electronic means of making new contacts or maintaining contact and other information about old contacts without being physically present.
Further, as mobile phones and other mobile devices became more ubiquitous, contact information could be manually entered into and stored by a phone during an in-person meeting. However, such manual entry results in an awkward pause in the social interaction and can introduce errors into the contact information. Applications developed that enable a business card or bar code information to be scanned into a mobile phone, but such an approach still introduces an awkward pause in the social interaction and is rendered less effective or even useless if one or both of the participants run out of business cards.